Putting Donald Trump's manifesto to the test in Democracy 3

You’ve probably heard of Donald Trump. He’s known for, among other things, being a billionaire real-estate mogul, the boss on the US version of The Apprentice, the fellow who upset lots of Scots with his golf course, and the guy who wears a guinea pig on his head. He’d also quite like to be America’s next president.

Like a lot of people, I often ponder what Trump would do in any given situation. Would he buy this new DLC expansion? Would he eat this pancake I’ve just made for breakfast? Would he approve of the funny wig I’m thinking of buying for a fancy dress party?

The truth is, I can’t answer those questions. But through the magic of Democracy 3, I might be able to find out what he’d be like should he get into power.

Democracy 3 is a political simulator bursting with charts, graphs, crises and political conundrums. It doesn’t quite capture the intricacies of different systems of government, but it’s fat with options and, importantly, modern, so it contains a lot of the political issues that America’s Next Top President will have to deal with.

First things first: I need a smart suit and a new haircut.

Perfect.

I’ve also rooted around on the internet, reading interviews and hunting down Trump’s views on everything from gun control to marriage. I’m all up in the man’s head. Earlier today, I made people refer to me as Mr. Trump. This is serious business.

I enter the Oval Office, conveniently situated in my flat in Paisley, Scotland, and immediately fire the sofa to assert my authority. There are more important things to worry about than furniture, however, as I have policies to make, lives to improve and a country to rebuild.

Where to begin? I reckon that Trump isn’t a man who messes around. He confronts his fears. That’s why my first order of business is solving immigration. Trump is terrified of Mexico, and he dreams of a great wall blocking any entry from the south. Time to make that dystopian dream a reality.

America already has some fairly robust border controls, but it’s just not good enough. There are illegal immigrants slipping through, and they are taking jobs from hard-working Americans, regardless of what the statistics show. The horror. To ensure the security of this wonderful nation, I double the budget and make sure the border is jam-packed with armed guards.

Lamentably I’m not actually able to build an actual wall, nor is there a way to make Mexico pay for it. This is actually what Trump wants to do. He wants to build a huge wall on the border, and then make a much poorer country pay for it. This was probably not even considered when Cliff Harris made Democracy 3.

Anyway, the guards get sent out and the Patriots, one of Democracy 3’s voter groups, are quite pleased. Ethnic minorities and Liberals, less so.

I get my first quarterly report, and things aren’t looking great. While the budget is doing ok, despite my completely rational decision to spend lots of money on border security, it looks like only old people and the Patriot voter group actually like me. An online campaign against me has also started.

A new law has been proposed. It looks like debt collection agencies, normally everyone’s favourite businesses, have been getting up to no good, aggressively extracting money from people after providing credit to them when more reputable places would not. The proposed law would limit their activities.

“Nonsense!” I yell, before mumbling something about the free market and personal responsibility. Time for me to flex my muscles and shut down this clearly terrible law.

This inspires my next big decision. Trump’s a fan of the free market, but one where America is protected. It’s a free market until you cross the border. Outsourcing and cheap imports are two things he’s not a fan of, unless he’s the one outsourcing or bringing in said cheap imports. He’s a cheeky pragmatist, that Donald Trump. I show everyone, especially foreign businesses, who the boss is by slapping down some import tarrifs, protecting domestic companies, the global economy and international trade be damned.

What I really need to do, however, is get people to like me again. I’m already thinking about the distant election, the boos, the throwing of rotten vegetables – I need to win back the electorate’s love. I take my oversized scissors to taxes, cutting income tax, and taxes for businesses big and small. I’m never going to make everyone happy, but the tax cuts certainly make Donald Trump a lot of new friends. None of these friends are people who have to worry about the Federal budget, however.

There’s a deficit now, and Donald Trump has made it very clear that he would never add to the deficit. This would not do at all. I can imagine him, flushed of face, hairpiece bouncing around, trying to escape this volcano of anger. I can imagine him firing me for being a bad digital Trump. I do the only sane thing I can do: I legalise drugs. All of them.

While the legalisation of drugs, or at least certain drugs, tends to be a liberal position, Trump sometimes appears to be very much for it, but he flip flops a lot. Recently he said that he’s pro-medical marijuana, but not full legalisation. The one thing that remains consistent is that he think’s that states should have the right to make that decision themselves, as long as the now legal drugs can be taxed. That position can’t really be reflected in Democracy 3, so what the hell, everything is legal.

LSD, heroin, cocaine – America’s about to have a very big party.

Okay, so the drugs thing hasn’t really worked out. It will take more time for it to have a positive effect on the economy, and in the meantime, America is in the grip of an addiction epidemic. An organisation known as the ‘Black Power Group’ is also becoming popular and threatening the government.

However! Violent crime is actually down, and I’ve made sure that’s all the administration is talking about. What a success story!

I’m keen to run with this, making the continued reduction of crime a top priority. Research has shown that, generally, a criminal’s weakness is their fleshy, vulnerable body. Knowing that Trump is an ardent supporter of the Second Amendment, to the point where he "would not be opposed to arming teachers", I reduce restrictions on firearms entirely, saving money and ensuring that everyone has access to deadly weapons.

Crime won’t know what hit it.

It’s a bullet. A bullet is going to hit it.

Oh dear. My plan to arm the nation has proved to be… ill-advised.

A socialist revolution is fermenting, as this ‘Revolutionary Army’ is gathering support and weapons in an effort to create a new socialist state. Why did I let everyone have guns? Oh yeah, and crime is now on the rise. Even my good work is being undone. It’s almost like selling people all sorts of guns might not be the safest policy, but I’ll be damned if I back down.

Every effort was being made to cut spending when the unthinkable happened: an assassination attempt. The failed assassination wasn’t made by The Black Power Group or The Revolutionary Army, it was made by a brand new group seeking to end my glorious reign: The Socialist Army.

Everyone is against me now. I can see them, skulking in the shadows. You’re fired! I’ll fire them all.

I’ve lost two members of my administration and assassination attempts are now so commonplace that I have to get my aid to pencil them into my diary. America’s credit rating has also been downgraded, as my tax initiatives prove to be not particularly well thought out. With everyone either jumping ship or out to get me, I’m convinced that only by investing in intelligence, police and the military will I make it through my term.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the political influence I need to do anything. I’m a president without power. I had a dream of slashed subsidies, private prisons, education cuts, a bigger military budget, lots of really cool drones and humongous wall to protect us from the rest of the world. Sadly, it was not to be.

Well, there you have it. A short reign punctuated by assassination attempts and, finally, murder. A slightly dark end for what was meant to just be a bit of fun. Maybe our pal Donald should play a bit of Democracy 3; it might change his mind about running for office.

I'm all for keeping entertainment news unpoliticized as possible and not turning everything into a god dang political THING, but if you take Trump seriously you deserve every bit of being made fun of for being a terribly silly person.

What fun. Let's misrepresent candidates we don't like and write a satircal article about enacting those misrepresentations in a game that has never been praised for its real-world accuracy!

So when can we expect a similiar article featuring Hillary "Wiped My Server... You Mean With A Cloth?" Clinton and Bernie "Socialism Is Great Until You Run Out Of Other People's Money" Sanders, or even Joe "Just Don't Leave Him Alone With The Ladies" Biden?

That's what you got when a lib assume he understood GOP policies...they misinterpret, misunderstand and try to implement things the worst way possible just to reach the conclusion - oh, wow - that your policies do not work.

P.S: besides that, Trump is no serious Rep, just a lib fancy posed to loose. He won't ever fool a serious GOPer, just elude the average dem/lib (90% of them) Reps are like that.

I'm pretty sure that I never actually wrote what my own political leanings are. Also, if I was a liberal and didn't understand GOP policies (a strange assumption, given that people are capable of understanding things that they disagree with), then it wouldn't be an issue if Trump, as you said, wasn't really a Republican.

I understand this is a satirical piece, but it just reeks of "butthurt liberal", plenty of points wrong, sounds like MSNBC wrote this.

1. Democracy 3 has a very well known left-wing bias. Not exactly a good platform for testing conservative positions.

2. "...he dreams of a great wall blocking any entry from the south". So you didn't actually research his positions, because if you did, you'd know that the wall is intended to block illegal immigration, which is a crime, which means the wall exists to stop criminals from committing a crime. Trump has never said that he wishes to stop all immigration from the South.

2. I don't see where you think Trump wouldn't crack down on usury, instead of allow it to continue and even support it, he's not indicated such a position and you're just playing off of memes that the TV fed you.

3. Oh, I guess this really is a joke article, mostly because it hinges on the unrealistic business and economics simulation of Democracy 3 (I have a degree in Business and yes, Democracy 3 does not do a good job simulating the effects of various policy changes in this category). Anyway, I don't think Trump would legalize all drugs, he seems to be a fairly wholesome person in that he's generally against substance abuse.

4. Your comment on guns does not reflect reality, every well researched study has shown that generally well armed societies tend to have less crime and removing firearms from such societies (The UK is a great example) directly leads to an extremely sharp increase in crime. Murder is already illegal, yet people still kill, if you make guns illegal, people will still get guns, except those who follow the laws. Laws do not stop crime because by their nature, they will only influence the behavior of people who follow laws, i.e. not criminals. This is why every mass shooting ever has happened in a "gun free" zone. Though as to your choice to legalize heavy ordinance, I'm not sure if Trump would go that far, he hasn't exactly expressed an opinion on the types of weapons that people should have the right to own.

5. Again, the entire premise and, as obvious, the outcome hinges on the fact that Democracy has a very bad economics simulation, which generally thinks that Socialism = Good, Capitalism = Bad and doesn't really let you make a lot of money via trade or the passive GDP increase you would see with laxer taxation, but stricter regulation on business, which is what Donald Trump is usually talking about, unlike what your media is telling you he's talking about.

The man knows how to make money and none of his political positions have been particularly inflammatory. Though I guess it's just trendy to pretend he's some crazy racist, despite never expressing a single racist view in any of his rallies, speeches or debates.

I've played dozens of hours of Democracy 3. I like the game a lot. I've experimented with a variety of mods as well. I was excited to hear about the new update recently.

The idea of using Democracy 3 to test or simulate any sort of real world issues is hilarious and horribly misguided. If you've looked into the game mechanics you'd realize most policy effects are entirely unsimulated and based on subjective political opinion. The community has created a variety of mods in an attempt to balance the game and add extra simulation or re-interpretations of policy effects.

Based on your "story" it seems like you haven't played the game much. Any sort of real major change in your government needs to happen over time and adjusting for other values as you go. Suddenly flipping a policy 180 will cause rippling effects throughout your democracy and cause everyone to hate you, and kill you.

I think most would agree that the vanilla version of the game is not very balanced, especially from an economics perspective (GDP, unemployment, taxation). Not to mention most international and military matters are entirely unsimulated. From a gameplay perspective there's very little reason to invest in your military and can basically drop it to zero assuming you funnel employment elsewhere. I recommend checking out the "Economic Realism Pack". I think an improvement in actual gameplay balance and from a subjective political perspective.